The Riddle of the Wall in the Brain

The blood-brain barrier has long stymied drug development for brain disorders. Researchers have finally begun to break through it.

 

- Erika Fry

FOR YEARS the darndest thing kept happening to drugs in clinical trials to treat brain disorders: They never made it to the brain. For pharmaceutical companies this problem was as costly—developing treatments for the central nervous system takes an average of 15 years and $1.5 billion (Rs 9,475 crore)—as it was, in hind sight, kind of obvious. The drugs were impeded in part by the blood-brain barrier, or BBB, a formidable physiological feature whose properties were discovered in the 1880s.